Conan The Barbarian (1982)

Crom Night

Conan The Barbarian (1982)
USA/Spain/Mexico 1982 
Directed by John Milius
20th Century Fox 
Australian Blu Ray All Zones 

“They told him to thrown down his sword in the earth. 
Ha! Time enough for earth in the grave.”
The Wizard, Conan The Barbarian (1982)

A quick note about the Blu Ray version of the classic film which I used for this review. It’s the Australian edition which my cousin, who lives there now, got to me fairly cheaply. The reason I chose this one is because it contains two different versions of the movie, dependent on what zone your Blu Ray is set to. If you watch this on the British setting, Zone B, it will only play the censored version of the film, falling in line with the BBFC categorisation. However, if you have a multizone machine and play it in another country’s zone, such as Zone A (US zone), then it will play the full length, uncensored version of the film.

I was fourteen years old when I first saw the AA rated (14 years and over... if you can remember that ratings system) Conan The Barbarian on its original cinema release back in 1982. However, I was quite familiar with the long series of short stories published in the UK at the time, which included the original 1930s stories by Robert E. Howard and intermingled with additional stories either expanded from unfinished Howard manuscripts or, more notoriously, rewriting other Howard tales and transforming them into Conan stories. I had read a few of the Marvel comic books and magazines too, of course but, not many of them compared to the amount of novelised collections of the character I read. 

So I knew what to expect from the character and, although I remember being slightly disappointed when the skeleton from whom Conan stole his sword didn’t rise up and attack him as the mummified remains did in the L. Sprague De Camp story that sequence was based on (although, there is a very slight suggestion that he almost does), I still felt that John Milius and his cast/crew had done an amazing job of, not only making an entertaining movie but, really staying to the spirit of Robert E. Howard’s original works. I’ve always thought of this as the last great studio ‘heroic fantasy’ genre film and, despite the number of knock offs (and even a genuine sequel), not to mention some not so great adaptations of Tolkien in recent years, I still stand by that. A few have come close but this one... this is the last great one I think, after all those films by the likes of Ray Harryhausen... where everything comes together to make things work and create the perfect ‘sword and sorcery’ film.

John Milius’ script, which trashed a lot of Oliver Stone’s previous draft and reset it in the original mythical timeline of Robert E. Howard’s fictional Hyborian Age (the film was originally to have been set in the far future like some kind of post-apocalyptic tale), is a pretty good creation and one of its strengths is that it gives a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had a very strong Austrian accent at that time, very minimal dialogue to work with. He was a relative newcomer on the acting scene but two things really help this very capable and interesting actor out near the start of his career. Number one is that he was surrounded with truly great co-stars like James Earl Jones (the voice of Darth Vader) who played the film’s lead villain, Thulsa Doom and, of course, the great Max Von Sydow (who plays a cameo as King Osric) and this was a good training ground for him, I reckon. 

Secondly, the minimal dialogue, while serving the actual character of Conan fairly well and helping make the character more convincing (he’s perhaps a little less wordy than his literary counterpart, if memory serves), allowing Schwarzenegger’s physical presence and attitude to define the role, is actually both very well written and, except in a few notable instances, is the pattern for the majority of the other characters in the movie too. Including Schwarzenegger’s brilliant co-stars Sandahl Bergman as Valeria and Gerry Lopez as Subotai (although they also get a few scenes to let their dialogue go beyond the few words variety here and there). Epic and poetic streaks of minimal dialogue like, for example... “The blood became as snow.” from the wizard, played by Mako, who is also the film’s narrator. 

A lot of the time the movie is almost silent acting but, that’s okay because the richness of the visual images, the fluid editing and the tremendous achievement of the musical score written by the late Basil Poledouris, means that the film really doesn’t need to lean on the crutch of dialogue and, in fact, cinema was born without it anyway, to an extent. 

Thinking about my favourite sequence in the film... after Conan has been crucified and bites the throat out of a vulture (which is a scene from one of the many Howard stories rubbed together and fashioned into a completely new story for the film), after he is brought back to life again... Conan, Subotai and Valeria penetrate Thulsa Doom’s lair in a sequence where they rescue King Osric’s daughter while taking on a fairly heavy loss. The whole sequence lasts maybe 12 or 14 minutes but, during the whole thing until the three thieves have escaped, just before one of them gets shot with a snake (yeah, you read that right), there are only four lines of minimal dialogue, comprising nine words. I noted them down as I watched this time...

Subotai: So this is paradise?
When he catches a glimpse of an enthusiastic orgy of cannibals.
Valeria: The princess!
Valeria: Come on.
Big, heavy looking villain: You!

The movie is pure cinema whichever way you look at it and, though I’m not all that happy with some of the satire on show... it takes a serious side swipe at hippies although, to be fair, it also bashes suicide cults at the same time (so it can’t all be bad), I’d have to say that the film certainly holds up to repeated viewings over the decades (I’m not sure if I’m into double figures on this movie yet but, getting there). It’s also probably one of the first films (at least released into cinemas in this country) to mix the bloody violence and gore which, even when the 1930s Weird Tales pulps the stories were first published in, are part and parcel of many of the literary yarns published in this genre. It actually felt, for a brief amount of time, that fantasy cinema was actually, finally growing up. Alas, the kiddies would win out in the end... and I’ll discuss what happened with the sequel when I rewatch that one very soon.

The film has some outstanding set pieces and moments, many inspired from the original short stories, plus some nice cinematic ideas... such as the sweat from Conan’s head as he steals a dazzling jewel dripping onto the eye of a giant snake which then awakes and attacks him. There are also some of Milius’ movie influences on quite vivid display too. The setting up of the encampment for the final battle sequence is like a miniature homage to Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and the writing that covers Conan’s body to help protect it from demons, when the wizard is trying to stop his almost dead body from being taken by them, is reminiscent of the writing used to try and stop other supernatural creatures in one of the segments of Kobayashi’s Kwaidan.

And then there’s that beautiful score by Basil Poledouris. I don’t think I’ve seen many ‘greatest film score’ lists over the last few decades that haven’t included this in their top ten. Certainly, I think it’s one of the most astounding achievements in the art of film music and one piece of music, The Orgy, co-composed by Poledouris with his daughter Zoe, which uses a repeat structure similar in style to Ravel’s Bolero, it seems to me, is easily my favourite piece of film music ever written. 

The score serves both as something supporting the movie’s emotional moments but also has its own ways of giving to the story. For instance, in a wonderful montage where we see Conan grow from a child into Arnold Schwarzenegger, pushing a giant Wheel Of Pain for a decade, Poledouris writes in screeching iron to the track, something which starts, timed to the rhythm of the score, as soon as the wheel first comes into the left of the shot, like a sound effect but, in this case, a musical punctuation. And, of course, as a stand alone listen, this is a fantastic work of art. I own various incarnations of this score on vinyl and then CD over the years, including one which is transcribed for solo church organ as an album. 

And that’s me done with the absolutely brilliant, first cinematic incarnation of Conan The Barbarian. I could never recommend this movie enough to anybody and this hopefully won’t be the last time I watch it. I’ll be jumping onto the slightly less satisfying sequel, which I’ve not seen more than a few times and don’t remember all that well, sometime very soon. Also, if you’re into this kind of thing, I’ll hopefully be reading a thick doorstop of a reprint of all the original Robert E. Howard Conan stories as they appeared in Weird Tales, in an absolutely beautiful hardback edition (double columned like those original magazines, no less), so look out for a review of that at some point too... 

No, wait, I ended up reading that and posting the review long before I got around to putting this review up so, yeah, you can read that review right here. 

The Martian Chronicles

Tyrr For Fear

The Martian Chronicles
Airdate: 27 January – 29 January 1980
Final Cut Entertainment Region B Blu Ray 
Three Episodes

Warning: Spoilers wistfully lapping at the edges of your consciousness

There was a bit of a delay before the TV mini series based on the great Ray Bradbury ‘novel’ of the same name aired (although there was a bizarre, truncated cinema release of it released in French cinemas the year before). It was held back for around about a year because, at a press conference for the show, which was adapted by the great Richard Matheson in terms of the writing, in close collaboration with Bradbury himself, Mr. Bradbury saw fit to tell the people of the press how ‘boring’ this production was.

It’s funny though... I remembered viewing the series in a far better light when I was a kid on that first airing and without it I probably wouldn’t have rushed out and purchased the novel that same week it hit our screens. I remember when I read it thinking how right the show had got the atmosphere of the book... not much action, wistful, philosophical, poetic, slowly paced... everything I associated with Bradbury so, as far as I was concerned, it was a great adaptation and I revisited it back near the start of the DVD era and, I still liked it. Well, now it’s on a UK Blu Ray release and, what can I say? I still love it and, when I rewatched it with the family, the four and a half hours of it went down very well. 

To be fair, I do remember it not being popular with too many of the other kids in the school playground back in the 80s but, well, if you were into sci fi even a little bit in those days, you were always going to be an outcast at school. 

I say it’s based on a novel by Bradbury but, well, if the mini series, which was broadcast in three episodes titled The Expeditions, The Settlers and The Martians, seems like a patchwork quilt of episodic short stories with a bit of an overall arc, that’s because the source was. The ‘novel’ The Martian Chronicles was published in 1950 but most of the stories comprising the narrative had been published in magazines before. At the request of his publisher, Bradbury reworked the stories, such as ‘The Silver Locusts’ and added lots of ‘story glue’ to make it work as a single tome. And it’s fine like it is (I should read it again) and, as far as I’m concerned, so is the mini series. 

It was star studded too... just some of the names who appeared in it were the male lead (part of the glue in the overall arc) played by Rock Hudson, joined by the likes of Gayle Hunnicutt, Bernie Casey, Darren (Kolchack) McGavin, Barry Morse, Nicholas (Spider-Man) Hammond, Roddy McDowall, Fritz Weaver, Maria Schell, Bernadette Peters and even a cameo by Jon Finch (playing a manifestation of Jesus Christ... who has the same initials as his great role of Jerry Cornelius, of course). 

The show is basically an exploration of ideas of the way humanity (as seen as Americans) manage to accidentally wipe out the ancient race of martians by accidentally bringing chicken pox, before colonising the planet. However, most of them leave Mars (or Tyrr, as it is in the Martian tongue) again because there is a war on Earth... the few who stay witness the Earth’s destruction by nuclear war and, though they survived by staying on Mars, it would be true that the few who stayed don’t necessarily think of themselves as the lucky ones. 

And everyone is fabulous in it. And, yes, it is slow and perhaps the times in a post-Star Wars movie era were such that people weren’t expecting what was delivered but, I think it’s stood the test of time. It’s essentially like watching episodes of The Twilight Zone, with stories such as the wonderful encounter by the man and woman who think they’re the last two people left on Mars, the man who builds androids of his late wife and daughter to stop the loneliness, the man who accidentally kills a martian because he thinks he is intending him harm rather than the act of kindness his fellow martians are doing for him... and the priest who meets balls of light but then accidentally manifests a martian as a crucified Christ. 

And it’s a great show, I throroughly enjoyed it. I stood by it back when it first aired and I stand by it now. If you’re expecting sci-fi action and spectacle then maybe you won’t find what you want here but, if you want a show to haunt you with thoughts about the way mankind chooses to live its life, then maybe you should give this one a go. Oh, and the music by Stanley Myers is really great... the CD usually gets a spin or two every year. 

So, if you want a slice of thoughtful and poetic science fiction to balance out all the other stuff, then this recent(ish) Blu Ray edition of The Martian Chronicles is a good way to get acquainted with it, for sure. 

My 16th Anniversary Blog

 

Saturation Disclosure

16 Years Of NUTS4R2

Well today marks the 16th anniversary of the blog and so, thank you to those who have stuck with me so far and, as always, thanks to the new readers. I literally only found out it was an anniversary a day and a half before this thing has to go up but, hopefully this one won’t seem too rushed in the writing.

Okay, so for this year’s post I thought I’d once again talk about what the beloved and much appreciated boutique blu ray labels are doing, this time in their own countries… although it was inspired by an email I received from Indicator this morning about a label talking about another country.

So on the pre-release/pre-order announcement of Indicator’s deluxe blu ray release of Lamberto Bava’s Macabre, there was, shouting out in upper case letters, the following disclaimer/heads up!*

PLEASE NOTE: THE US EDITION OF MACABRE WILL BE RELEASED BY VINEGAR SYNDROME USING THE SAME RESTORATION AND EXTRA FEATURES AS CO-PRODUCED BY POWERHOUSE FILMS AND VINEGAR SYNDROME.

Which hit me as an odd but, certainly, welcome caveat. On the plus side… finally a label who recognises that probably more than half of the people who would buy such a title would be getting it from whichever country releases it first. They’ve pre-warned customers that they can get, more or less, the same content in both countries from both Indicator (in the UK) and Vinegar Syndrome (in the USA). So, yeah, more of this kind of forewarning please, it’s very welcome.

Alas, sadly for me (and also probably for many of the UK audience that such a title would appeal to), my first reaction was… ‘Wait. Didn’t I already buy that title fairly recently from 88 Films, also in the UK?’ And the answer, again sadly, was yes!

So we are now in a situation where a film is licensed to one company and, not that long after (only six years, in fact), the same film is being sold by another label, who now have the licence. Rather than said label, in this particular instance Indicator, releasing something that hasn’t been released already in a) the UK or b) the rest of the world.

So yeah, every time this stuff happens, I feel like I’m being punished by the very labels I make a point of supporting. Do I need to buy this one again? Both Indicator and Vinegar Syndrome tend to be thorough with their materials, transfers and extras but… well I’ve bought stuff from 88 Films before which seems to be using the same elements as Vinegar Syndrome so… is it really worth it to double dip on this title? Especially since, like most physical media buyers I know, another ten years may roll by before I even get a chance to watch it because of all the good stuff that’s getting released these days.

And it’s not like this is an isolated incident either. Around a year ago I bought an HMV Exclusive in the UK box of the classic 1970s film Westworld (I revisited it but I haven’t even got my review up on this blog yet) but, already, Arrow Films UK have brought out their own special edition of the film.

Similarly, I bought the 88 Films UK blu rays of the Shaw Brothers productions of Black Magic and Black Magic 2 not all that long ago... so imagine my slight disappointment when I found both films had been included in Arrow’s UK’s recent Shawscope Volume 4 boxed set.

I think there needs to be some law around about how long a licence can be sold onto another company and a new version put out, to save all this double/treble dipping. Certainly for releases in the same country but, bearing in mind that the target audience for these particular things are going to be buying from all the different territories then, well... globally too.

Just a little food for thought there. And if you’re still reading then, thanks once again for supporting the NUTS4R2 blog. It really is much appreciated.

*As I was writing this, the email announcement of the same film came into my inbox from Vinegar Syndrome, which included more hidden and similar but, less shouty, wording.

Lady Terminator

Terminate Her

Lady Terminator
aka Pembalasan ratu pantai selatan
Indonesia 1989
Directed by H. Tjut Djalil
108 Sound Studio 
Mondo Macabro DVD 0

Warning: Spoilers I guess... it’s not that kind of movie.

I’ve been meaning to catch up to Lady Terminator for a couple of decades now. After a point, I decided to not grab the old Mondo Macabro DVD because I thought, surely a film as cool sounding as this would be getting a Blu Ray release soon? Well, apparently not. I recently listened to a Mondo Macabro podcast from a couple of years ago and, apparently, while they’d like to do a Blu Ray, there are some rights issues on that format so, that’s torpedoed for a while, it would seem. So, yeah, I eventually sourced the old DVD copy least. And, yeah, the picture is a little softer than I would have liked but it’s still quite watchable. 

Okay, so this is not quite in the realms of a ‘so bad it’s good movie’ because, some of the production values for the time aren’t too terrible (I mean, they’re also not great but, yeah, watchable). This is, it has to be said, more of a ‘so silly it’s good’ kind of movie and, anyone who knows me will known that silliness is a quality I treasure highly. And this is, indeed, an attempt to blend mythical Indonesian goddess legend The Queen Of The South Seas (in a slightly changed variant, from what I can tell, after having read about some of these stories) and transplanting it into a... ‘not even trying to hide it’, blatant riff on James Cameron’s The Terminator. Just without even the relatively low budget that first movie had and, you know, without the time travel aspect. The film even has it emblazoned on the credits... Original story from The Legend Of The South Sea Queen.

The pre-credits sequence depicts an actress called Fortunella playing The Queen Of The South Seas in days gone by. In her ‘under the sea’ but sometimes floating on the surface castle, she kills another in a long line of lovers during intercourse. Now at first I believed this was just a case of ‘vagina dentata’ when she bites the man’s cock off with her undercarriage and, that’s certainly what I’d been led to believe by the aforementioned podcast. But, no, the Goddess lady just has a big, bitey snake living up in her genitalia. Although it seems to do a lot of ‘arterial spray kind of damage’ to the men in question. Which leads her to ask the question... “Is there any man who can satisfy me?”

Well be careful what you wish for because... her 100th lover, a wizardish chap, pulls the snake from her sexy bits before it can do the damage. She promptly vanishes but not before putting a curse on him, telling him his great, great granddaughter will die from her hand. 

Roll credits and then, after they've played out, we are transplanted to modern day (1989) Indonesia, where a young anthropology student played by Barbara Anne Constable is researching the legend and, ends up sinking to her sea castle, being magically tied up to the Queen’s bed and then having a badly cartooned snake penetrating her bikini bottoms and up into her crotch. The idea being that this has turned her into a minion of the South Sea Queen to seek out and extract her revenge on the great, great granddaughter. Oh, and it also somehow turns her into a machine-like cyborg, as we see her rise naked from the sea and sex up two local men, who both are killed using exactly the same MO as the original lady... having their penises lopped off by the incisors of the snake in her undercarriage. Not a machine snake though... it’s all a bit odd, to tell the truth. The police autopsy report later says... “Cocks bitten off by eels.” so, yeah, make your mind up people!

Okay, we then cut to the great, great granddaughter, local song singer celebrity Erica, played by Claudia Angelique Rademaker (from what I can tell, the IMDB really is bad at trying to figure out who’s who on non-American movies). When Lady Terminator comes for her in a crowded bar, the bullet count is high and she’s only just rescued by hero cop Max, her new love interest played by Christopher J. Hart. It’s amazing how most of these actors and actresses only have this one film to their credit. 

The film then becomes a chase and a series of action sequences, punctuated by the occasional sex scenes and, of course, it includes some additional male member chomping action. Lady T seems obsessed with destroying men’s genitalia much of the time, it has to be said. At one point she riddles a cop with plentiful machine gun bullets until he’d deader than dead but, still takes a second to kick him in the balls before moving on. Another cop is riddled with machine gun bullets in his testicle region too. This lady is really going balls to the wall in this movie, for sure! 

But, of course, it also has to hit all those ‘similarities’ to The Terminator. So she uses the police band to track them, drives through the wall of the police station and crushes a cop against the wall in the process and even has a scene where she slices out her damaged eye with a scalpel in a mirror, before fixing said eyeball and returning it, after she heals it with her electricity eyeball powers. Oh, right, I forgot to mention those. These are the same eyeball powers which enable her to shoot lasers from her eyes in later scenes, just like the main antagonist in Mausoleum (reviewed here). The film even has one of the cops say to the granddaughter, “Come with me if you want to live.” So, yeah, like I said, the film is pretty up front about what it’s trying to rip off here for sure. 

And I loved every minute of it. This one is a comic romp that doesn’t seem to know it’s comical but, that’s okay, the silliness is infectious and I’d have to say that Lady Terminator is definitely the very definition of a ‘switch your brain off’ movie. In fact, I’d say if you did try to watch it while your brain was engaged, you might come away very confused. A solid recommendation from me though and, yeah, hoping those Blu Ray rights issues get cleared up at some point because I would love a high definition copy of this one. An absolute banger for an all nighter of a movie screening, that’s for sure. 

Breaking Glass

 

Through A Glass Darkly

Breaking Glass
UK 1980 Directed by Brian Gibson
Allied Stars Ltd
Fun City Editions Blu Ray Zone A

So here I am again, revisiting one the greatest and most powerful films about both the British music industry and the gradual erosion of the soul, in an edition put out by a relatively small boutique blu ray label from the USA. So the first question you have to ask is, why is an important British movie like Breaking Glass, which perhaps requires a fair amount of understanding or at least sympathy to the turbulent times in the country in which it was made, only available on a pretty small, US label? 

I don’t know the answer to that question, by the way but, big thanks to Fun City Editions who have wisely chosen to put out a nice transfer of the original British version of the film, rather than the version which came out and was truncated by ten minutes in the American cut, in an exercise in making the film a bit lighter and more palatable to the audience, rather than allowing the bleak heart of the movie and the heart rending ending (completely cut from the US version) to shine through and remind people of the true, haunting power of the motion picture industry when all the elements come together so nicely.

Hazel O’ Connor was a bit of a pop star for a while in the UK when this film came out, which also includes the songs she wrote for the movie (many of which climbed the UK pop charts at the time) and... I dunno, I thought she’d disappeared after this high point in her career but, visiting her website recently, I realise she’s still going, still releasing records and doing gigs and... yeah, I need to catch up with what she’s been up to lately, it seems to me. 

The film is an absolute belter of a movie (much like the accompanying song-track album) and stars Hazel as Kate, a political activist style songwriter who doesn’t want a commercial music career and is kind of content (sort of... not really, it’s complicated) being the angry young woman artist playing pubs for not very much money. Then along comes Danny, played by Phil Daniels, fresh from his lead role in the movie version of The Who’s rock concept album Quadrophenia, who makes his mind up to manage her band... after he’s convinced her... helping her build the group (including a stand out performance from a very young, bearded, Jonathan Pryce as their half deaf saxaphone player), get gigs and break into the music business. A kind of negotiation of the ‘sell your soul and sign on the dotted line’ Faustian agreement where they come into contact with music promoters played by the likes of Mark Wing-Davey (yes, that’s the original Ford Prefect on radio and TV, to all of you brilliant The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy fans) and a record producer played by Jon Finch (Jerry Cornelius himself, ladies and gentlemen). 

As you would expect... the group starts slowly falling to pieces and there’s some harsh imagery punctuated by occasional beautiful moments. Moments captured by some incredible shot designs, such as when Jonathan Pryce is being auditioned in Kate’s flat. The camera starts in close up on Pryce working his sax and then pans out to the accompanying Kate on her mini keyboard (and her positive reaction), before pulling out again to Danny in the foreground as he obviously thinks the same. And the cinematography in this film, by Stephen Goldblatt, is perhaps under sung and not lionised as much as it should be... because for a film with such a gritty subject matter and music which really hits hard, it looks absolutely amazing all of the time. 

And that song-track is indeed hard hitting and quite addictive, as I’m sure anyone who owns the Breaking Glass record album and subsequent format incarnations of it will attest. The lyrics are haunting and feel like a punch to the gut (or the arse... but not nose... yeah, watch the film) and make for beautiful earworms all the way through. And of course includes such hits such as the saxaphone heavy Will You? and the apocalyptic Eighth Day, performed near the end of the picture (or at the end if you watch the vastly inferior American cut, thankfully not on this Blu Ray in that form) which has an absolutely iconic look to the costumes and lighting at the concert, taking place at the old Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park (sadly deceased although, I remember seeing a memorable stage version of The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy there in the late 1970s). 

The real stars of the show, though, are Phil Daniels and Hazel O’ Connor. Daniels is quite charming and likeable in his role. And O’ Connor. Well, anyone doubting her acting credentials needs to see this film, for sure. It’s a subtle and evocative performance which, honestly, should have got her an Oscar, or something, if the film had been taken more seriously Stateside. Ironically, one of her most amazing moments in the film, where she slowly breaks down while trying to sing a recording of her chart hit Will You?, was cut from the old US version. All I can say to the people behind the truncated version is... that’s called vandalism guys!

And there you have it, a little label in the US of A called Fun City Editions puts out one of the most dynamic and essential movies about the British music industry and, also, one of the most entertaining and formidable, it has to be said. If you’ve not seen Breaking Glass before then I’d urge you to grab the Region A edition from America (make sure your player can handle US discs first, people!), as it’s the only game in town as far as a high quality transfer of the movie in its original 2:35.1 aspect ratio is concerned. At least at the moment. I was tapping my toes all the way through this one and had an absolute blast. This film... and the lead actors... just don’t get enough love, if you ask me. 

Sea Change

A Hasty Return

Sea Change
USA 2007 Directed by Robert Harmon 
Sony Pictures TV Blu Ray Zone 1

Warning: Many spoilers in this one.

Sea Change is the fourth of the Jesse Stone movies and, I have to say, it’s my least favourite in this nine movie box set so far. Not that it isn’t good... just not the best, I reckon. It’s also something of a transition episode in terms of the regular characters. Tom Selleck, of course, once again plays Jesse Stone, impeccably... but Viola Davis returns as Molly Crane for only one scene. When a lonely Jesse phones her in the middle of the night to ask how her pregnancy is going. So, his new police support person, is Kathy Baker as Rose Gamon. 

In this one, Jesse’s ex-wife puts a halt on their nightly phone calls as she is seeing someone else. So Stone slip slides back into alcoholism but, as his new psychiatrist (William Devane returning as Dr. Dix) tells him, he needs to keep busy if he wants to keep the drink away. Be that as it may, Paradise, Massachusets is a small town where not much crime has been happening of late. However, there is a reported rape by a young victim of an incident which took place on board one of the yachts on the annual Paradise boat race, which he half heartedly gives to Rose, partially to help get her back into field work but also because, he’s not sure he believes the girl. This subplot also involves the great Sean Young (from Blade Runner, reviewed here) as a boat race pleasure seeker. 

Meanwhile, he sees that there are three unsolved cases and so he takes the most important one, from some time in the 1990s, involving a huge bank robbery, which he goes at relentlessly. He goes to visit Hasty Hathaway (played by Saul Rubinek) who you may remember is in jail after the events of Stone’s first week or two on the job (and who hired Stone for the job of police chief in Paradise in the first place), as he realises his money laundering was probably involved in the robbery, as he ran the bank. 

About this time, Suitcase (played by Kohl Sudduth) finally wakes up from his coma after being shot in the head after the events of the previous movie in the series, Death In Paradise (reviewed here). But he’s a little different. He has no memory of being in hospital but he seems to have retained everything people told him or read to him while he was in his coma. He’s also suddenly found what Jesse once told him is ‘cop-ly intuition’ and, even though he’s not quite on active duty just yet, he works out what is really going on with the bank robbery case and gives Jesse the obvious lead he’s been missing. 

Of that, I have to say I figured out who did the bank job and just what had gone on way before anybody in the movie did. I just suspected it at first but when Jesse becomes romantically involved in one of the people who at first doesn’t appear to be that close to the case, I was pretty sure I knew what was going on. So that’s a shame because I’d have preferred not to have known until the reveal. 

Now, the rape case is interesting in this one because... and you could never get away with this now in the ‘me too’ climate... but it hinges on consent and basically takes the tact that, in this particular case, the so called victim has been fabricating aspects of the incident for her own gain. I’m glad that somebody was smart enough to portray this because it’s not always good to believe what you see on the surface. 

Now, I was expecting, hoping, that Sea Change would be an episode where Jesse didn’t actually have to kill anybody. I mean, all the while he’s being intimidated by the brother of the killer who Hasty shot to frame him for the intended murder of Jesse in his first case. There seems to be a peaceful resolution to this story but, just when you don’t expect it (so that’s good at least) the killer turns up in Stone’s home and nearly ends Jesse... who promptly puts a few bullets in him and, once again, adds to his phenomenal ‘small town’ body count. I’m wondering if we’ll get an episode where someone doesn’t have to die for a change but, hey, I’ve still got another five of these to watch and, yeah, although this one was a little disappointing, I’m still really enjoying them and look forward to what Jesse gets up to next. 

Anthropophagus

Quite Intestine

Anthropophagus
aka The Grim Reaper
aka Anthropophagus - The Beast 
aka The Savage Island
Directed by Joe D’Amato
Italy 1980
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Gut munching spoilers within.

Anthropophagus... which turns out to be a thriller rather than a horror movie, in my book... is one of those films that the kids in their early teens would talk about a lot in the school playground back in the 1980s, when they used to swap VHS and Betamax bootlegs of all these kinds of films and, it has to be said, the attempts at goriness in the movie are exactly the kind of thing that school kids tend to delight in. Now I’ve not seen it myself before now (we never had a VHS machine until a bit later and I wasn’t that much into films branded as horror movies anyway, at the time) but I find it mad that a film which was banned in the UK during the video nasty scare (and I can see why this one in particular would be) and which led to seizures, fines and imprisonment for owners, is now something which you can just walk into your local HMV or Fopp for and pick up a totally uncut, Blu Ray restoration with no fuss at all.

The film follows Julie, played by Tisa Farrow (sister of Mia but perhaps a lot less seemingly unhinged, this was her last movie) and she is going to a small, one town island in Greece to look after her friend’s blind teenager while they go on holiday. However, she is having trouble with her travel plans and runs into a group of friends touring the area. They agree to take her to her destination on their yacht, to take a look at this island themselves. When they get there, however, they find the place almost deserted because... a deranged madman played by George Eastman has been killing and eating the rest of the population. 

And, when their boat floats off (after a pregnant woman played by Serena Grande finds one of her friend’s head in a bucket, which she accidentally squashes with her foot... it makes sense in context, I assure you,,, and is dragged off by said madman to, it would seem, save for the next day’s dinner)... the majority of the friends have to spend the night and the next day trying to survive the lurking madman as he picks them off one by one. 

Now, it’s not a great film by any means. The camerawork for the first three quarters is almost completely hand held, reacting to the milieu but... it doesn’t make for the best compositions, although when it settles down a bit towards the end, there is some nice stuff happening. Such as when Julie smashes a big mirror leading to a secret chamber and the bits of glass left standing are all reflecting her face individually. The music is pretty awful for a lot of the film too... kinda turning into more what you would expect from an Italian horror movie towards the end but, yeah, a lot of it is pretty jaunty and in your face, calling attention to itself for all the wrong reasons. 

Now, the special effects are, to me, not very impressive, The head in the bucket looks completely fake, as do a lot of the gnawed up corpses found in George Eastman’s cavern/nest towards the end of the picture. The flesh biting also looks just a little too easy but the film does have two gory set pieces which have, rightly or wrongly, garnered it some kind of reputation in horror film circles (although, again, I’d hesitate to call this a horror movie... more a violent thriller). 

So the first of these is when George strangles the pregnant lady (played by Serena Grandi) and then pulls the unborn fetus out of her womb before he starts eating it (I believe a skinned rabbit was used for the special effect). The other thing which people seem to remember, probably because an alternative publicity painting version of it was splashed over a lot of posters and probably videocassette covers (ensuring it attracted the attention of the people in UK government to put it on the banned list), is when Eastman is killed by a pick axe blow into the stomach. As he slowly dies he gathers up his intestines and starts gnawing on them as one last meal before he expires. 

And... yeah, it’s not a great film but I did find it one of those more comforting watches. Because there are very few surprises and a lot of it is silent movie acting as people wander around dark places with a torch not saying much in many scenes. That  being said, there is one wonderful surprise early on. When a couple of the protagonists are investigating a noise in the wine cellar and the audience are expecting to get their first look at the killer (Eastman’s face is held back until about midway through the movie, which has been reliant on POV shots from his point of view to highlight his presence up until later), one of them is wounded by the hysterical blind girl popping up out of a barrel and stabbing for all her worth, in fear. So this was a pretty neat and unexpected moment but, yeah, like I said, don’t expect many surprises in this one, I would say.

At the end of the day, I actually had quite a good time with Anthropophagus but... it really is a switch your brain off romp for people who are used to violent Italian films being made during this period. There’s also a nice extra on the disc, which is a half an hour interview with George Eastman from 2017, where he talks about his good friend Joe D’Amato (although he’s very critical of him as a director... he thinks he could have really gone much further if he gave up control of the films and stayed just as a producer) and there are lot of interesting nuggets revealed about the shoot, why Eastman wrote it the way he did (he wanted to go to Greece and have a holiday with the director but, it turns out, his own scenes were shot in Italy), how he came to inadvertently be in three of Joe’s porn films and, also, some interesting info about people he’d worked with for Joe... such as Laura (Black Emanuelle) Gemser and her husband Gabriele Tinti. So that’s me done with this one and, I guess, I’ll now have to go and look at the pseudo-sequel Absurd and report back on that one soonest. 

The Reptile

Jacqueline's Pearcings

The Reptile
UK 1966
Directed by John Gilling
Hammer Studios/Studio Canal 
Blu Ray Zone 2

Warning: I guess this one has venomous spoilers in it.

I thought it was time to revisit a good old Hammer horror in the form of their 1966 entry The Reptile. It’s funny, I didn’t know it when I started it but, as soon as I saw the locations and sets, not to mention that it’s shouted out at the start that the film takes place in Cornwall, I was pretty sure this one was using the same locations to shoot as Hammer’s The Plague Of The Zombies (reviewed here). Sure enough, I checked it out and it was, indeed, filmed back to back with that movie... not to mention having some of the same cast members. It’s also got some very similar plot elements... more like a simplified version of that film. 

In this one, Harry Spalding (played by Ray Barrett), accompanied by his new wife Valerie (played by Jennifer Daniel) inherits a cottage in Cornwall from his recently ‘deceased in dodgy, pre-credits circumstances’ brother. The locals don’t all like strangers and are superstitious about a series of ‘deaths’ which they attribute to a ‘black plague’ but Harry and Valerie are befriended by the local pub landlord Tom, played by Hammer stalwart Michael Ripper, in a much more heroic and featured role than he got in many of his movies for the studio. They also have the local ‘character’ Mad Peter (played by John Laurie of Dad’s Army) helping them, a little, before he succumbs to what’s been ailing the other fatalities. 

But what’s this? Can the epidemic of bizarre, unexplained deaths have something to do with Spalding’s neighbours... Dr. Franklin (played by Noel Willman) and his lovely young daughter Anna (played by a young Jacqueline Pearce in her first feature film role, although Hammer’s The Plague Of The Zombies and another movie with her in it both made it to cinemas before this one, in the same year)? Maybe it’s the curious chap from India who lives with them and sings Anna into a frenzy so she can turn into a big snake woman and inject her venom into innocent victims that could be the trouble, perhaps?

Yep. This is how I like my horror movies... strangers coming into a small, bigoted community, refusing to move and then helping, with a small team of likeminded individuals, to rid the village of the local horror preying on them from within. It’s not got any flashy camera work on this one but it’s definitely a good ‘comfort horror’ movie and certainly a nice watch for Halloween (I watched this one the day after the 2022 Halloween Fright Fest, although I’m not sure how soon this review will make it onto this blog). Definitely a relaxing slice of genre and it’s a lot of fun too.

Jacqueline Pearce is expecially good in both her human form and when she’s pearcing... sorry, piercing... the necks of the locals with her double toothed, vampiric looking teeth. Apparently though, the creature suit and make up was too much for her to handle in her claustrophobic state so it was the last time she worked in that kind of role for anyone, by the sounds of it. 

The principal actors are all good and make a well oiled machine of a team but Michael Ripper is especially great in the role of Tom. It’s sometimes very easy to take for granted just how good some of these well known character actors were but, of course, they became known as such because they were regularly re-used by studios because they could be counted on to give a reliable, dependable and believable performance in whatever roles they were thrown into. Ripper has the bad fortune to be lumbered with a fairly fake looking, somewhat freaky and almost ‘hipster’ beard which, honestly, really works against the character but, it doesn’t stop him from being absolutely awesome in the role and he does, it has to be said, kinda steal the scenes away from everyone else in the picture, whenever he’s on. 

It was good, too, to see John Laurie in such good form as Mad Peter. He’s given some quite nice and eccentric dialogue in this one and he really chews up the scenery in this but, honestly, it totally fits the character he’s been given and it was obviously written for his comic strengths, even if he does meet a ghastly death at the hands of the title beast halfway through the movie. 

And, okay, a short review but The Reptile gets a strong recommendation from me. Sometimes the Hammer films of this time underperformed and, well, I’m not sure how well this one did (I suspect it was made for one of their double bills) but their output here was all quality stuff as far as I’m concerned and, even the ones that maybe didn’t quite make the right pace, were usually still very entertaining. This one’s definitely worth a watch or three. 

Evil Bones

Animal Tragic

Evil Bones 
by Kathy Reichs
Simon and Schuster
ISBN 9781398531222

So here we are again. Another year, another new instalment of Kathy Reichs’ Temperance Brennan novels... the real Temperance Brennan, not the bizarrely un-Tempe-like version that appeared on the Bones TV show. Although... okay, I’ll get to that in a little while.

It goes without saying that Kathy Reichs’ books are cool page turners that, more often than not, cause the reader to hurtle through them at a very fast rate and, this one is no exception (I think it’s the quickest I’ve ever read one of her books). And this one, Evil Bones, ticks a lot of the signature boxes I’ve come to expect from this writer, in a story that involves Tempe and her usual accomplices investigating a series of killed, mutilated and unusually posed animals, courtesy of a serial killer who is obviously going to be stepping up to humans not too long after the book begins. 

So, signatures like... we have the usual, abundant number of cliff hanger sentences to end the majority of the chapters, to keep the reader jumping into the next chapter without pausing. Such as “Looked around in shock. Ruthie was gone.” or “As I turned, I felt something sting my left arm. A moment of dizziness. Then the world went black.” or even, the more succinct, “Holy Bloody Hell.”

Also included are the usual dalliances with Temperance’s dream states but, I have to say, the author shows a little more restraint than usual in terms of the real estate given over to her main character’s adventuresome slumbers in this book. That being said, there is a moment when Tempe enters a kind of trance state and has a ‘Millennium TV show’ style direct connection to the mind of the killer... which seemed a bit odd and is not mentioned again in the rest of the novel. Is it a case of future character development or, maybe it’s a pointed reference to the books Reichs writes with her daughter, which I’ve not actually read. I’m not sure... to be honest. But it was a strangely off-kilter moment in the book. 

However, it doesn’t really matter because the book crackles along and captivates the reader at every turn. One interesting thing I found was, given the title of the novel, a definition of an evil act, from one of Tempe’s long term psychologist friends. The key points being the committing of a horrifying act accompanied by the deliberate planning of such and also coupled with the deed itself being an inexplicable thing in the eyes of other people.

All good stuff then except... okay, I have a few bits of negative criticism this time around. 

So aside from the annoying habit of, once again, referencing Bones as a TV show in the world of the novel (without Tempe mentioning once that the character on the show has the same name as her), I was quite taken aback when Reichs calls her character’s famous phone ring tone ‘the Kill Bill whistling clip’. Surely Reichs, along with a gazillion other people, will recognise that specific piece of music as being a main theme from the movie Twisted Nerve which Tarantino just needle dropped into his own film at an appropriate moment. 

And I also didn’t have too much trouble identifying the killer this time around (after my initial suspect turned up half way through the book as the next human victim). A certain mode of transport and the reoccurrence of it and its famous logo in the text seems to point fingers at the miscreant fairly early on. So, yeah, not fooled for very long this time around, I have to admit.

But the real problem for me is... this didn’t quite feel like it was Temperance Brennan doing the narration here. As in, it didn’t quite feel totally like Kathy Reichs writing this one and, I dunno, like I said, Tempe just doesn’t seem herself as much as usual. I doubt the idea but... it did make me think, at one point, if Reichs has started employing a ghost writer or uncredited co-writer to get her yearly novels out? Which just seems wrong... but I know other modern writers have done a similar thing of late. And the characters don’t seem to be firing on all cylinders this time around either... displaying the lack of quick action and logical deduction you would expect to find in a badly written horror movie. Not to mention it all feels a bit less epic than many of her previous novels. So, yeah, I was a little concerned at all this. 

But, not, as I said earlier, to the point where I didn’t thoroughly enjoy this book and, although not a jumping on point, fans of the original Temperance Brennan should definitely get a kick out of Evil Bones. So hopefully we’ll have another one published next year, for sure. 

China O' Brien

China In Your Hand

China O' Brien
Directed by Robert Clouse
USA/China/Hong Kong 1990 
Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray Zone B

I’m glad that Eureka Masters Of Cinema (and also, now, Vinegar Syndrome in the US) have put out a 4K transfer of the two China O’Brien films. They were produced by Fred Weintraub and directed by Robert Clouse, who were the winning team behind Bruce Lee’s Enter The Dragon (review coming soon) but these two were held over for two years after they were shot back in 1988. The two films were made... I’d say back to back but, incredibly, simultaneously and all mixed up, within a six week period of that year, which is perhaps why the fight scenes look a little less spectacular than the ones Cynthia Rothrock had been doing previously in her Hong Kong movies.  

But I remember these when they came out... through word of mouth. They were finally picked up for distribution in both England and the USA, like a lot of movies at the time, as straight to video releases... no theatrical window whatsoever. And I remember seeing posters for the two when they were each released, up on the inside windows of my local off-licence where one could rent the film in question. I never saw them myself but I remember friends and acquaintances talked them up quite a lot and they were apparently doing a very lucrative trade. In the UK, for instance, this movie was number two in the rental charts, topped only by Rainman. 

This was Rothrock’s transition from the Hong Kong action movies to the US market and, once they were released, it really paid off big for all concerned. It was co-produced by Golden Harvest, who were also trying to expand into the American market at the time. A third and fourth film were planned very quickly after the success of the first two but, by that point, Rothrock had signed on to do a movie based on The Executioner series of books, co-starring Sylvester Stallone (a project which, sadly, never materialised) and her contract was such that she wasn’t allowed to appear in any more Hong Kong financed movies anymore. But this gave her US career a very good, if slightly delayed, kick start and I believe she’s kept in very good shape and is still making movies to this day. In the interviews I’ve seen her in on various new releases of her old stuff, she does look pretty darn amazing for a woman in her late sixties, for sure (pretty much like a thirty year old, it seems to me). 

In this one she plays the titular character China O’ Brien, who trains cops in martial arts as a big city police officer. Alas, after she shoots a kid early on in the film (an evil kid about to kill another cop but, a teenager nonetheless), she hands in her badge and gun and heads to Beaver Creek in Utah, where her father is the local sheriff. Unfortunately, when she gets there, the whole town has been taken over by a bunch of drug runners/sex traffickers etc and they pretty much have the legal system (and everything else) in their pocket. Only her father is resisting the corruption in town but, because of this, it’s not long before he’s dead too and so China runs for the position of mayor, in an effort to clean up the town and take all the bad guys down.  

Aiding her in her fight for justice are her two martial arts main male leads. First up is Richard Norton, who played such a charismatic villain who fought Rothrock in Magic Crystal  (reviewed here). He plays here as a kind of subdued, romantic interest for China (because the producers weren’t really into the two leads getting romantic but it’s exactly the way they deliberately played it in their performance, rather than what was in the script) and he’s just really likeable. The other male lead is Keith Cooke as Dakota, a kind of revenge seeking, motorcycle riding, Tonto-like character... who first protects and then joins up with the other two, to help bring justice for the people of the town. 

And I say Tonto-like because, before more than about twenty minutes into the movie, I realised that this was pretty much a Western, just with kung-fu fighting replacing the guns and bows and arrows (although there is a bit of gun play in this one too). But, yeah, it’s got the stranger coming back to town to protect the people from the corrupt officials in power and it has its fair share of brawls and bar fights... it’s just a Western in another guise, sold to a generation who, by the late 80s/early 90s, were not going to be happy to watch a straight up film in that genre. 

And it works really well on that level, I have to say. It’s a fun movie, sure enough and the fights, while suffering for the lack of time to choreograph and shoot them (the Hong Kong productions would take as many weeks to shoot a fight scene as the director had time to shoot both whole movies here), have a certain energy to them and the video audiences in the US and the UK were not greatly familiar with this style of fighting at the time... especially coming from a female lead (and Rothrock certainly shines in this one... as do her co-stars). 

There are also some nice things going on with some of the cinematography on occasion too. Such as when, in an early scene in Beaver Creek, Rothrock gets into the drivers seat of her car in profile with another car parked up between the camera and her vehicle, facing the other way. The two diagonals of the side struts of the windscreen on each vehicle create a triangle on the right hand side of the shot, highlighting Rothrock’s head in this visual space formed by the crossing lines perfectly. So some very nice stuff going on in a film which doesn’t overtly cry out as being this well lensed... but is, nevertheless. 

Oh, and there’s a nice little joke which I assume was intentional, which made me smile a lot. In one fight scene, I think it’s the penultimate of the big fights in the film, China finds herself losing a fight and then Norton’s character yells “China!”... and throws her a bit of ‘china’ to hit her opponent over the head with. So, yeah, there are some nice touches and I can completely see why this was such a big hit on the video rental market at the time. 

And that’s me done on this one, I think. I had a very good time with China O’ Brien and I’m looking forward to watching the other film in this sequence, which is also included in the Eureka Masters Of Cinema release as a double bill in a nice slip case. This one’s not as good in terms of action as Rothrock’s earlier films but, yeah, good enough, I thought. 

The Monolith Monsters

Rocky Horror Show 

The Monolith Monsters
USA 1957
Directed by John Sherwood
Universal/Eureka Masters Of Cinema 
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Big, black crystalline spoilers toppling your way.

After directing the third and worst of the Creature From The Black Lagoon sequels, The Creature Walks Among Us (reviewed here) John Sherwood’s next feature was The Monolith Monsters. The last time I watched this one, as part of an American DVD set, I remember thinking that this was the most ridiculous premise for a so called ‘creature feature’ I’d ever seen, with probably the least menacing and dull threat to civilisation conceived for a 1950s Universal monster movie. If indeed a bunch of non-sentient rocks could be called a monster. But I also remember quite liking the film, partially because of its silliness and also because it’s a well made piece of hokum which completely fits in with what Universal were conjuring up for the monster crowd back then in terms of the gravitas mixed in with the pseudo-scientific explanations and the ultimate cure for the threat.

Revisiting it now as the second film presented in the Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray set Three Monster Tales Of Sci-Fi Terror... I’d have to say that my perception of the movie is in no way altered other than, I like it even more the second time around and, via the beautiful print and transfer job in this edition.

Okay, so this is one of a few films from around that era (probably many of them from Universal) that starts off with a shot of the planet Earth suspended in space (sans clouds because, nobody had thought about the Earth being covered in clouds until years later when man travelled into space) and with a voice over narrative leading the audience into the film. This time it’s talking to us all about the phenomenon of meteorites, as they have hit our planet and others since the beginning of time (apparently, who am I to argue with that time placement?). After an extended montage of landscapes of craters etc devoted to these celestial visitors, the music swells mysteriously and the titles roll. 

Then, after one half of a local geologist team picks up a sample of rock he stumbles across in the desert, he heads back to his sleepy town situated completely out of the way in that desert but, after he gets the rock sample wet... well, when his partner comes into the office the next day, Grant Williams as David Miller, he finds loads more of the rocks in a smashed up office and his partner standing there, his lifeless body more or less turned to stone.

Meanwhile, David’s school marm of a girlfriend, Cathy Barrett, played by Lola Albright, is taking some of her kids on a field trip. One of the kids takes a rock home but then washes it. Later, she is the only survivor discovered at her home and her body is also slowly beginning to turn to stone, so she’s taken to a local hospital and placed into an iron lung while the doctors and scientists can find a cure for her condition, hopefully within eight hours or so before she also dies. 

And then, a big thunderstorm starts and it’s raining overnight in the desert, just as David and his scientist friend Professor Arthur Flanders, played by Trevor Bardette, find out that it’s water that is causing the rocks to grow and suck all the silicon out of everything around them. They realise that the rainfall means the rocks in the desert will keep toppling down a slow slope towards town and then growing again until they completely destroy the town. They think they have some breathing space to find a way of combating these completely unaware, black crystalline rocks when the rain stops but, of course, the desert sand absorbs the water which the rocks inadvertently absorb to keep growing so, once they’ve been kick started by the storm... they now aren’t going to stop. Can David and his friends stop the progress of the deadly but docile mineral before it falls on the town and, perhaps, all of civilisation? Well yeah, of course they can but, things get intense for a while.

I still love this film. Everyone in it is playing it completely straight and working hard to pretend that the threat is something to be taken much less tongue in cheek than it seems it should. At more than one point, the people expounding these silly theories are deriding the ideas as nonsense or scientific gobbledy-gook, while simultaneously investing in them as the best answers and course of action. Even the score is playing it’s part here... some of which I think is probably tracked in or re-recorded cues from other films of the time such as Creature From The Black Lagoon (if my ears and memory aren’t failing me). So every time we see a bit of rock come into contact with a bit of water and it starts bubbling up, the music goes into a full blown, histrionic stinger of a cue that might be best reserved for some much more ostentatious looking form of life ending peril. Yeah, this music made me smile so much with its excessive attempts to convince you that... these rocks are out to get you!

And the special effects, I have to say, are amazing. We see the rocks grow before our very eyes, partially as a genuine chemical reaction (I presume) and it looks pretty amazing. There’s a wonderful moment where we see the townsfolk all watching and, above them, the tumbling, crashing rocks slowly approaching in a brilliant combination of live action and effects shot which, although I knew roughly where one part of the shot finished and the other part was joined, I really couldn’t detect in terms of matte lines or anything (and, yeah, even on this new blu ray, the shot looks absolutely brilliant). 

And there you have it. A completely non-traditional kind of ‘monster’ picture with, well, it has to be said, really no monsters in it at all except faster growing geological formations but, despite the unintentional comedy of such a concept, it’s still a satisfying film and I think The Monolith Monsters would make a great addition to any B-movie themed all nighters which saw fit to include it as part of a line up. Definitely a curio but one which I still like to revisit whenever I have the opportunity. Glad it’s finally on Blu Ray... I think this might even be the film’s first UK release on a home video format?

Aurora Model Kits

The Big Glue

Aurora Model Kits
with Polar Lights, 
Moebius, Atlantis
By Thomas Graham
3rd Edition
Schiffer Publishing Ltd
ISBN 9780764352836

Subtitled with Polar Lights, Moebius, Atlantis... Aurora Model Kits is a wonderful tome which gives a complete history of the famous, American-based modelling company. Now, I never had any Aurora model kits when I was a young ‘un (or so I thought until I read this book... more on that in a little while). The company were, however, the stuff of imagination of even us UK based youngsters, because of the adverts that came up on the back of various American comics of the 1960s and 70s and also, of course, because of the many pop culture references to the kits they were known for, especially their famous models based on various Universal Monsters. 

Now, I never had any of their Universal Monsters (which I even have captured, in somewhat badly printed monotone likenesses, on an extremely limited set of trading cards based on them) and I always assumed that this was because the models never made it over to these shores but, since my mind was thrown into doubt about that (again, I’ll get there in a little while), I’m guessing my parents just didn’t want me to have them after all the furore and fall out of scaring all the other infant school kiddies with my drawings of dancing skeletons. So this book is very much, for me, scratching an itch of something I never got to own.

And it’s a truly fantastic, coffee table book which is unbelievable value for money considering the production values on the thing... not to mention the many beautiful full colour photos of, not just the various kits themselves but also prototypes of models that never made it onto the production line. 

Starting out in a garage in Brooklyn, the company had a fairly brief but lucrative run, lasting from 1950 to only 1977, when the writing was definitely on the wall as the people who took over the company obviously had no idea, it seems to me, as to what they were doing. They were a plastics company who converted the big failure of their plastic coat hanger products into a huge, overnight success. When the inadequate coat hangers left them with no more orders and a surplus of stock, one of the employees realised that you could make a toy bow and arrow out of the hangers, which sold by the bucket load. Then they went into their first model kits, starting off with two knock offs of another company’s kits.

As the book goes on, we get a complete history of the company, some nice stories about the various partners who ran the show (including the clashing egos and how that also contributed to the creative mojo of the products) and also some stuff about the various box artists whose powerful paintings of planes, automobiles and tanks etc graced the covers of the kit boxes. As well as an insight into the often unsuccessful attempts to infiltrate the general toys market (while the ‘hobby’ line of kits was often going very strongly... as were their slot car racing toys, which are mentioned often but not really covered within the scope of this book). 

The book also covers things like examining the pros and cons of different metals for the molds and also how various re-released models might sometimes be tied in to a current movie title and promoted as such, like their Viking Long Shipbeing resurrected and promoted when the Kirk Douglas/Tony Curtis movie The Vikings was released into cinemas. 

And, of course, it gets into their lucrative figure kit models and the success of things like their Universal Monsters(which absolutely nobody at the company believed in and of which a small production run was initially made to appease one of the partners... for the full and satisfying story, read the book). It also talks about the golden age of modelling which, for example, accounted for nationwide sales of model kits to the tune of $224 million by 1967. It also tells of the demise of the company and the ‘hobby industry’ in America, as children chose to spend thier time playing video games when they were released into the wild, rather than sticking small pieces of plastic to each other. 

A highlight of the book, for me, was the slight memory jog when I found, I did indeed own an Aurora kit as a kid after all. That wonderful, intricate and endlessly fascinating model of Spider-Man perched on a wooden railing and webbing a floored Kraven turns out to have been an Aurora kit. And, of course, I also remember seeing the Mr. Spock VS an alien snake monster thingy on shelves in toy shops when I was a youngster (always wanted to build that one). 

The book also covers the resurrection and re-issues (and marked improvements) of many of the Aurora line models in recent decades, by companies such as those mentioned on the cover of the book... Polar Lights, Moebius and Atlantis. And finishes it all up with an “Illustrated Directory of Aurora Plastic Kits” totalling nearly one hundred pages in it’s own right. 

And it’s a really wonderful story of a once great company... not to mention endlessly illuminating and, of course, entertaining by allowing the reader to wallow in the nostalgia of days long gone by. Of the book I have only two criticisms... 

Much is made of the various instruction booklets to the kits but none are pictured here. Secondly... the photos in the directory section could have done with being a lot larger (I wouldn’t have minded wading through another hundred or more pages if the pictures would have been friendlier to my eyesight, for sure). But, yeah, these are minor criticisms and I have to say I would hands down recommend Aurora Model Kits with Polar Lights, Moebius, Atlantis to anybody who remembers such plastic delights from their youth. I absolutely loved this book and it looks really beautiful, with some nice spot varnishing on both outer covers. Definitely a necessary purchase for all you kit-heads out there, I would say.

Dirty Harry

Punk, rocked!

Dirty Harry
USA 1971 Directed by Don Siegel
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Dirty Harry and the homicidal maniac. Harry’s the one with the badge.
Poster Tagline.

You don't assign him to murder cases - you just turn him loose.
Alternate Poster Tagline.

Well okay then. I’ve not seen Dirty Harry in about 40 years so it was due time for a revisit, I think. I’m a little more impressed with it now than I was when I first saw it in the late 1970s/early 80s on television but, I liked it enough to see all the sequels at the time (catching the last two of the five on their first run cinema releases). This one’s directed by classic Hollywood director Don Siegel (who I will always remember best for the original 1950s version of Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers... reviewed here) and stars Clint Eastwood as the titular Inspector Harry Callahan... who these days, in real life, probably wouldn’t be on a police force for very long (although, since writing this and seeing what’s going on with ICE in the US of late... maybe he would).

With the background turmoil of a load of assassinations, the Miranda rights, the Vietnam war and a general feeling of overall descent in the USA... Dirty Harry came out just at the right time. The character was, perhaps, not necessarily an antidote to the political turmoil of the times but certainly someone who highlighted the increasing sense of futility the general public were feeling at the time. At least that’s what I think and I certainly suspect that would account for the high box office take on this one. 

Harry is a judge, jury and executioner who is much more concerned with cutting through the red tape and upholding justice, rather than doggedly following the law (which anyone who has done any time on jury service, would recognise are two entirely different things). Clint Eastwood does really well in this one and deserves the iconic status that this film cemented for him in American cinema (following the equally iconic portrayals of his spaghetti western characters for director Sergio Leone in the 1960s). Dirty Harry, like most detective and crime stories, transplants the lone hero figure associated with the mythic American western and continues to lionise this style of character at a time which was ripe to challenge authority in an urban setting. To say the film and lead character was influential is perhaps, an understatement. Not just in films either. The comic book character Judge Dredd, for example, would surely not exist in the form he first appeared in without the legacy of Dirty Harry... just as Johnny Alpha, aka Strontium Dog, would not have existed without the influence of those Leone westerns.

The film looks great, too. Starting off with a series of scroll downs on a memorial stone to represent the San Francisco police who have given their lives in the line of duty, the film quickly establishes the villain, the Scorpio killer (inspired by the real life Zodiac killer), played by Andrew Robinson (who Star Trek fans will be know for his regular role of Garrick in Deep Space Nine, of course). We get the sniper rifle panning around the urban jungle where he shoots a woman swimming in a roof top pool, Lalo Shifrin’s landmark score already doing some heavy lifting in establishing an off-kilter theme to represent the twisted mind of the killer. When Harry goes to investigate, through the opening credits, there are some really nice, unusual angles as we watch Clint Eastwood’s character climb a cooling tower to figure out where the shot came from. Seeing it in its intended wide screen aspect ratio, which I probably wouldn’t have when it was first screened on TV, the film’s beautiful shot design and fluid camera movement is really effective.

This continues throughout the course of the film as Clint’s gum chewing hero goes about his business. The director also pitches different textures against each other in aesthetically pleasing ways, such as when half of the screen is the front of a building with nothing going on, while the other half is Clint walking away from the character, up an alleyway in long shot. It’s good stuff. 

There are also some nice instances of visual shorthand in the movie, cleverly built to tell a piece of story with no dialogue or further clarification needed, such as when a shot of a cigarette falling into a pile outside a car door shows us instantly that the driver has been sitting in the car, with the motor running, for a substantial amount of time. There are a few regrettable moments where, for instance, various people are standing still in the street to watch the shooting of the film, which the director presumably hopes the audience won’t notice but, even so, it’s a tremendously good looking movie and, seeing it in its original aspect ratio really helps it. 

It’s become a cliche now but, this may well have been one of the first movies to feature a character running around from phone booth to phone booth in a city, reacting to the demands of the killer... although I suspect this was a phenomenon on TV before this. It’s well done though, with the majority of the sequence utilising no music until, in a nice piece of soundtrack spotting, Schifrin’s powerful score kicks in for the climax of that particular sequence. And even the ending of the film, where Harry repeats his famous “Did he fire five shots or six?” speech, has a final result which mirrors the corpse in the water at the aftermath of the first bullet shot fired at the start of the picture. 

At the end of the film, Harry mimics Gary Cooper at the end of High Noon (reviewed by me here) by throwing away his cop badge into the same river as the bad guy he’s just dispatched and turning his back on authority for good. One wonders, if the studio would have known the film would be so popular as to require a sequel which kinda ignores this final act, whether that sequence would have stayed in. Several actors including John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Steve McQueen and Frank Sinatra turned down the main lead on this one and, one also wonders if they would have, if they’d known how much the film would capture the zeitgeist of the times, declined the role as they did. Certainly, John Wayne obviously regretted it, compensating by making his own versions of the urban western with McQ and Brannigan. 

This film didn’t put Clint Eastwood on the map, he was there already but, it certainly cemented his reputation as a number one box office draw and, honestly, I’m really looking forward to revisiting the other four movies in this series, which I got for my birthday* in the Blu Ray box set Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry Collection so, yeah, more to come here. 

*over a year ago now, since time of writing.

The Thief Of Baghdad 1961

Ghost of Baghdad

The Thief Of Baghdad
aka Il ladro di Bagdad
Directed by Arthur Lubin & Bruno Vailati
Italy/France 1961 
Titanus
Imprint Blu Ray Zone B

Well, while I was certainly expecting the 1961 Italian/French co-production of The Thief Of Baghdad to be somewhat less interesting than its predecessors, I had at least expected a trashy, action packed peplum which would entertain me no end. Especially since it stars former Hercules and action muscle man Steve Reeves in the titular role of Karim. Instead... I found myself mostly just feeling like I was sitting around waiting for something to happen.

Now this was my first Steve Reeves movie (still waiting for the Hercules films to be released in their correct aspect ratios in English friendly versions on Blu Ray so I can see them) and I was maybe expecting a little more from him. He was, in all honesty, a little wooden but, at the same time, he was perfect as a leading man presence in these kinds of things so, I am still looking forward to seeing him in other movies. But this was a bad first impression (even though this movie seems to be a much loved film on the IMDB). 

Okay, so the plot is almost identical as the Douglas Fairbanks version (which I reviewed here.) except it’s almost half the length and, yeah, it’s in vibrant colour (for the most part). Many of the special effects don’t seem nearly as good as either the silent version or the 1940s version (reviewed here), it seems to me. Although, that being said, I loved that, when Karim mounts the flying horse Pegasus for the first time and it takes off in to the air, both he and the magical steed both turned into a cartoon version of themselves for the long shot, in exactly the same way that Kirk Alyn would start flying in the two 1940s Superman serials (which really need to be upgraded to Blu Ray people. Come on you slow poke companies!). So that was kind of charming. 

Karim’s love interest, played by Giorgia Moll, is fine in this but, it seems to me that she’s somewhat underused and the character is less credibly drawn than the equivalent characters in the previous movie versions. Considering she’s kind of the lynch-pin of the action and the quest for ‘the blue rose’ that follows.

I was hoping that, once we got into the quest section of the film, it might pick up a little but... dunno, I found it just as dull as the rest of the movie, truth be told. Also, one of the elements which have been added to the story here, namely a magic ghost helping Karim on his quest... seems a ‘convenient’ way out of trouble for the script writers most of the time. However, once the identity of the ghost is revealed at the end of the picture, his presence in front of several people in an earlier part of the film just, from what I can see, makes for a massive continuity problem within the story too but, honestly, I’m not going to bother analysing this thing too much. 

Unfortunately, the great Carlo Rustichelli’s score for the movie seems a little lacking too and, yeah, short review and all but I was really disappointed in this third movie in Imprint’s astonishing new The Thief Of Bagdad set, I’m sad to say. Especially when compared to another peplum I revisited six months or so before, namely the great Mario Bava’s Hercules In The Haunted World (review coming soon). As you would expect, Imprint have done an amazing restoration job on the film and, yeah, a big thank you to them for putting these things out, for sure. But I won’t be recommending the third movie in this set to anyone I know, alas.